Welcome to the 2nd edition of Eco-Friendly Friday! I know it’s still Thursday: I am posting this week’s green tip a little early because tomorrow is the 15th of the month and I have a charcutepalooza challenge post going up…
Today I’d like to talk about line drying your clothes.
Before I go further, I have not one, but two confessions to make. First: those clothes in the picture above? Not mine. That’s a stock photo. Because my laundry’s ugly. And second: I haven’t used my clothesline in months. Because of something called winter, which was very cold and very snowy.
So now that I’ve, um, come clean, I want to encourage both you and me to start line drying our clothes. This is something that’s very easy to do outside if you have some space and decent weather. But you aren’t limited to the outdoors if you want to line dry. I’ve been looking into getting one of these- a retractable clothes dryer
– for my basement so that I don’t stop line drying in the winter, but one of these might also work if you live in the city.
The benefits of line drying are pretty obvious: by not using your dryer, you are conserving energy and saving money (if you line dried your clothes on a regular basis, I believe you’d save a few hundred dollars a year). Now that it’s starting to warm up, I’ve been going outside to hang my clothes. And you know what? I enjoy it- there’s something relaxing and meditative about it. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.
Now maybe hanging all of your laundry seems overwhelming? Well, how about aiming to hang just some of it? Half of it? Any amount of laundry that you hang cuts down on the time your dryer will need to run. If you are worried about that stiffness that can happen when you leave your clothes outside to dry, a good solution is to leave your clothes on the line until they’re 95% dry, then throw them in the dryer for just a couple of minutes to soften them up. That’s what I do.
So what are you doing to live greener these days? I want to know! Feel free to link to your eco-friendly blog content with the “linky tool” below. I’ll leave the linky up through Sunday 4/17/11.
A lot of topics fit comfortably under the eco-friendly umbrella, so I’d love to hear about the following:
* your organic gardening/small-scale farming efforts
* your support for local farms/farmer’s markets
* what you cook with your harvest/farmer’s market haul (includes recipes for canning and preserving)
* cooking efforts that save you money, cut down on packaging and allow you to eat better
* your composting and worm bin efforts
* your experiences keeping chickens, goats, cows, etc.
* your experiences with beekeeping
I also want to hear about:
* your tips for recycling and reusing things around the house instead of throwing them away
* projects you’ve done that have improved the energy efficiency of your home
* green decor ideas
* recommendations for environmentally friendly products you use
* examples of how you’ve conserved energy and/or saved money by adopting a greener lifestyle
Here are the linking up guidelines:
* Please add a link to this post somewhere in your blog post entry stating that it’s a part of this week’s Eco-Friendly Friday over at Healthy Green Kitchen.
* Make sure to link to your individual post, not to your home page.
* Make sure your post contains some element of “eco-friendliness”.
* Please only link to one blog post per blog.
* When you link, please share the subject of your post; your name and the name of your blog are optional. Sample entry: Natural Beekeeping (Winnie @ Healthy Green Kitchen)
This post is linked to Simple Lives Thursday!
